NOREN FILMS / 12 NEW RIDING PRODUCTS / PRESERVING OFF-ROAD ROUTES

VIKING BIKINGNorway on an Africa Twin

SUZUKI’S DR650 TRANSFORMED!

From Dual-Sport to Enduro Tourer

MAKING A COMEBACK

New Husky Street Legals

ALONE WITH A BROKEN LEG

Mishap on the Mosquito Coast

Overland ExpoBash in the Blue Ridge Mountains

Riding NewfoundlandThe Trans-Canada Adventure Trail

ARE ACCIDENTS INEVITABLE?Two Kinds of Motorcyclists

Picks for Your Next RTW TripPicks for Your Next

March/April 2015$5.99 US / $6.99 CANScan for a FREE

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Gear Evolution 1

2RTWSit around a campfire for more than two

minutes with a bunch of adventure riders and

sooner rather than later the conversation turns

to the “mystical black art” of gear selection. Who’s

got what, how does it work, what will it burn, does

it record automatically, will it self-inflate, and does

“it” need triple-A, double –A or solar power?

After 11 years on the road we’ve seen an unprecedented level of technological advancement when it comes to riding gear, IT gadgets, and even camp gear. Accessories that were once just science �ction are now sitting on the shelves of your local outdoor store.

For us, the once black art of gear selection is less black and now more like 50 gentle shades of grey.

Riding Gear

Ah, the uniform! We hit the road back in 2003 in our new Cordura Tuareg suits, Cordura was a new mate-rial then, and was a welcome relief from traditional sweaty black leather. The Tuareg was the nearest you could get to a Dakar Rally suit without actu-ally coughing up the entrance fee. After taking a beating through Africa, the Tuaregs were retired in favor of the BMW Rally and Street Guard suits. We wore the blue and white emblem on our shoulders for eight years until, in 2011, we donned our current and favorite riding suits, the Touratech Compañero. We could write reams about the advantages but the two biggest developments we’ve seen may surprise you.

First, the Touratech Compañero range o�ers a speci�c “female style” in its line-up, tailored to

�t the curvier female shape. Most manufacturers don’t o�er this option, so female ADV riders end up

in poorly �tting men’s suits. Remember—happy wife, happy life! Next up was the implementation of an

“over-suit” for cold/wet weather riding. This beats hav-ing to get undressed by the roadside to put on a Gore-Tex

liner any day of the week. It also means you’re not wear-ing a water-logged sponge into your hotel room or tent at

the end of a long, wet day.

48 March/April 2015

Gear Evolution 2

AdventureMotorcycle.com 49

HELMETS

by Simon Thomas | photos by Simon & Lisa Thomas

It seems every year there’s a new must-have helmet design. We spent the �rst nine years of our journey wearing the BMW �ip-front modu-lar lids. Hey, when you’re dealing with a dozen African military checkpoints every day, being able to show your face without taking o� your helmet has a lot of merit. For us that thinking changed three years ago when we pushed our heads into the super lightweight Airoh Aviator.

At just 920 grams, these super-comfy enduro helmets felt like coming home. It took a little adjustment to get used to riding only in gog-gles, but the goggles-only option has had some surprising advantages. The ongoing dry and sore eye issues we had su�ered for years sud-denly stopped, too. For us goggles are de�nitely the way to go.

The best metaphor for the evolution of our comms is to think of the start of our journey as The Flintstones and this year as Star Trek. Lisa and I have always seen the bene�ts of bike-to-bike comm systems as much for safety as for the thrill of being able to share a unique mo-ment, in the moment.

We set out with the Autocom systems which, in their day, were great. The downside was simply the amount of cabling that we had to deal with. There was the power lead from the bike to Autocom unit, the lead that ran from the unit to the walkie-talkies, and then �nally another cord that had to be run from the unit to the helmet.

Today we have a couple of SENA S20s snapped to our lids. With Bluetooth 4.0 they’ll connect to almost anything and the voice activation is a huge gift when you’ve got your hands full o�-road. What Lisa and I �nd mind boggling is the audio quality. At 80 mph with enduro helmets and goggles there is zero wind noise or static transmitted through the systems. The audio is so clean it’s scary: Scary good.

COMMUNICATION SYSTEMS

Gear Evolution 3

I’m not sure why, but we get asked all the time about which water �lters we use. In all honesty we use them rarely and only in the harshest of environ-ments. In the early years we used pump-style �lters. During our Amazon ride using these turned out to be a fool’s economy, as we were losing more �uid through perspiration while pumping than we were actually �lter-ing. Filter e�ciency has advanced by leaps and bounds and the pump �lters we used in the early days have been replaced with super-e�cient gravity-fed �lters. Today we’re using two MSR AutoFlow™ Micro�lters. Per unit they’ll �lter almost two liters a minute. When you’re desperate, that’s a lot of life-saving �uid.

WATER FILTERS

There’s a myriad of stove options on the market today, each one claiming to be hot-ter, more e�cient or more versatile than the last. Our requirements have always been very clear:

• We need a multi-fuel stove that will burn anything. As long as our bikes have fuel we can cook.

• We need to be able to maintain and service the stove in the �eld. We’re not regularly near a service center.

• Crucially, the stove needs to be adjustable. A stove that burns super-hot with no adjuster is either on or o�. That may be great for climb-ing Everest, but most of us aren’t. Without be-ing able to adjust the flame you can only heat up food. With an adjustable stove you can boil or simmer to your heart’s content and if you’re cooking on it for more than a few months this

is essential.For 11 years now we’ve been using the exact

same stove and swear by the MSR Dragon Fly —an awesome bit of kit.

CAMP STOVES

Ah, the dreaded laptop. Trying to quantify how this technology has advanced is almost impossible. Once upon a time small was good, and we swore by our Sony Vaio. Small, fast (back in the day) and with a clear screen. Today with our video editing and photography making up such a large part of our days we resigned ourselves to our changing needs. My (Simon) “go to” machine is now a 17" Mac Book Pro running 2.2 GHz Intel Core i7, with 16GB of RAM.

Tech talk aside, considering the beating our IT gear takes whilst it rattles and vibrates inside a metal pan-nier, one of the most crucial advancements we’ve seen over the years is the emergence of solid-state drives. If you’re looking to minimize the risk of data corruption to your precious drives, spend the extra cash and go for the solid-state drives. Lisa �nally threatened to murder me in my sleep if we didn’t purchase her own laptop. She now runs a Mac Book Air.

LAPTOPS

50 March/April 2015

Gear Evolution 4

CAMP STOVES

Does anyone remember the black and white screened Garmin V? GPS units today speak to you, connect to the internet, Bluetooth through your helmet, sing you a lullaby and will

almost brew your co�ee in the morning.We started out with a Garmin V, which did a great job. Today

we’ve shunned the idea of the fancier GPS units. We even avoid the touch-screen version. For us the Garmin 62s works great as it’ll accept memory cards, upon which I can load up to 32GB of data. Robust, easy to use and reliable.

Maybe we’re old school but we’ve learned that the more moving parts there are to go wrong, the more likely it is that somewhere down the line

you’ll be �xing it. For Lisa and me what we need a GPS to do hasn’t changed. The three most important features have been:• A clear screen for easy legibility• A strong antenna, remember your little box of GPS magic isn’t anything

more than a waterproof calculator if it can’t connect to the satellites and give you a triangulated position

• An option to load and store a stack of data on the GPS unit or data card.

Our recording gear has seen more change than almost anything else we carry, and that’s as much due to the leaps in technology as our increased desire to share more clearly and sharply our experiences.

Our �rst camera was bought by Lisa’s par-ents just three days before we left the U.K. Our Little Fuji S300 with its then-huge 3.2 mega pixels (stop laughing) did us proud for the �rst two years. Halfway through the South American leg of our journey we knew we needed to get more seri-ous and with a little borrowed cash we bought our �rst DSLR, a Nikon D70s. The learning curve was steep but then so were the rewards. In 2011 whilst in Asia, we were delighted when Nikon became the o�cial camera supplier of the 2RTW project. Our �rst large-scale photographic exhibition kicked o� at the main Nikon center in Kuala Lumpur and later in the Petronas Towers.

Today our cameras are scar-ily more sophisticated than our earlier compact unit. Lisa regularly produces world-class images using her Nikon D90, whilst I love my Nikon D3. We’ve got a selection of �ve lenses that we swap between us, with each lens being chosen to ensure we’re carrying minimum gear for maximum �ex-ibility.

RIDING BOOTS

GPSCAMERA GEAR

For gear that gets an absolute beating you’d think we’d change our boots all the time. Let me tell you, if it ain’t broke don’t �x it! I set o� 11 years ago in a pair of Gaerne SG10 MX boots and re-placed those with a pair of SG12s just last year.

Lisa had ridden in the Alpin-eStar Tech 6s for a decade until moving to the SG12s as well. The boot o�ers a ton of protection and a hinged ankle, which makes walking and riding way easier.

AdventureMotorcycle.com 51

Gear Evolution 5

Sometimes evolution just means constantly assessing your require-ments and con�rming, to yourself, that the kit you’re using �ts your needs perfectly.

I’d love to claim that we’re NOT biased when it comes to our tent, but… we are. Our Hilleberg Keron 4GT has stood up to alpine blizzards, Saharan sand storms and biblical rain and has taken care of us. Super easy to erect, this tunnel tent just does it all.

That said, there’s been some evolution here as well. We’ve been providing Hilleberg feedback and performance info for the last eight years and discovered that, based on feedback we provided from our Mongolian ride, they had re-engineered the tent and material to perform even better. Cool!

TENT

AUXILIARY LIGHTS

Like anyone who has ever been stuck in the dark, tired and dusty, our need for great bike lights has always been the same, but over the years the tech has be-come, well, techier.

We both rolled out the door with a set of regular �lament auxiliary lights that ran along with the single OEM headlight of our bikes. Five years in and we’d boosted the lumens substantially with the Tourat-ech Xenon auxiliary lights and a dual headlight on my R1100GS. Today things have come a long way and we’re running four times as much light and drawing half the battery power. Both Lisa and I are running super bright XenonOz light kits installed in the headlights of the bikes and Clearwater LED lights as the auxiliary. The Clearwater lights are insane: The two Ericas (model name) I run produce an eye-searing 12,000 lumens when both are on full. The slick feature with all the Clearwater products is the ability to dim them using a simple dial, which makes them ideal for using as daytime running lights.

Here’s looking forward to the next evolu-tion and the next adventure. See you down the road. 2RideTheWorld.com

Simon Thomas and Lisa Thomas have set an uno�cial new world record for the longest continuous journey by a motorcycle team. Now over 516,000 km and over 11 years on the road, the couple are an inspiration to all who chase the dream.

52 March/April 2015

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